


Not a Game

by Glinda



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Betrayal, Double Agents, Gen, Post-Movie(s), SHIELD, picking up the pieces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1585904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are nearly two hundred SHIELD agents in the field when the Treskillion falls. SHEILD has fallen and no one knows who to trust, innocent or traitor, for everyone in deep cover, one thing is certain, extraction is never coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a Game

There are nearly two hundred SHIELD agents in the field when the Treskillion falls. SHIELD has offices of varying sizes in strategic locations across the globe and the vast majority of them have active ops on-going. Some of them are easy enough to recall when the news comes through, and several offices will judge who on their staff was secretly HYDRA by who comes home and who doesn’t when they call. Others though, are in deep cover, embedded in other organisations, gathering vital information on terrorism plots, people trafficking or drug smuggling. Some of them can’t be contacted, some of them can but it would endanger them to contact them. SHEILD has fallen and no one knows who to trust, innocent or traitor, for everyone in deep cover, one thing is certain, extraction is never coming. 

This is a lie of course. 

Maria Hill, formerly Deputy Director of SHIELD, soon to be Head of Security at Stark Industries, was Nick Fury’s second in commander and protégé for a reason. She’s a great believer in expediency and doing whatever is necessary to get the job done. She’s not in the least bit sentimental, but there’s one last thing they’ve always shared, they might manipulate, lie to and use their colleagues and subordinates for the greater good, but they’ll move heaven and earth to bring their people home safe and sound. (If spying is a game it is one she’s always played to win.) She’s painfully aware how many of their agents are in the field when the Hellicarriers fall, in the quiet moments in their dank temporary base of operations she runs the numbers, trying out a variety of simulations and possible contingencies to get their people out of the field without tipping their hand to their enemy within. Maria Hill is nothing if not a pragmatist and the harder she looks, the clearer she sees that there can be no purge, no great cleaning of house, out of which SHIELD can rise again a phoenix from the ashes. HYDRA is in too deep, a symptom of a greater sickness in the intelligence community, not the cause of it. There’s nothing left to save. 

Well, not quite nothing. She’s got a list now, of everyone that HYDRA considered a threat, at least everyone in SHIELD that Zola’s algorithm had identified as a threat. It’s fairly safe to consider them as at risk from HYDRA retaliation. She doesn’t have the resources any more to help them, but she still has one last extant team, off the books and out of sight and she owes them this much. The chance to salvage something from this mess. It’s not enough, but it’s all that she can do. 

~

Sharon Carter, formerly Agent Thirteen, joins the CIA after SHIELD falls. She’s assigned to a team that is specifically dealing with extracting former SHIELD agents from joint CIA/SHIELD projects. They’re mostly operating on domestic investigations or in South America, so she recognises a lot of faces. She’s the first line of interrogation because they reckon a familiar face for the debrief will put them off-guard. A lot of the HYDRA agents no longer have anything left to loose so can easily be identified by the way the try to kill her the moment they’re alone with her. (Every time she has to kill one of her former colleagues, she makes sure to look them in the eye, to tell them ‘Captain’s orders’, like a mantra, the only thing she has left to believe in.) It’s satisfying if dispiriting work, but she does get to bring some good people home, and because she’s good at what she does, well, the CIA turns a blind eye to her orchestrating the extraction of other former SHIELD agents wherever she can. She can’t save them all, and some of them don’t want to be saved, but every life saved, every agent brought home is another victory. Whether they go home or to prison after she’s done with them is neither here nor there. Another weight on the scales to balance against all those she can’t save. She knows logically that she’s doing everything that she can, more than anyone could ask of her, that those deaths are not on her hands, are on HYDRAs, on the double agents who worked alongside her. Those who twisted the cause she believed in to their own ends. But still, she feels it as a personal failing, she should have seen this before, should have looked harder, should have stopped it. 

She understands now, what Natasha meant about having red in her ledger. She’d give quite a lot to speak to her former colleague now, but she’s a bit afraid of the answer she thinks she’d get. Some debts cannot be wiped out. 

~

Clint Barton, formerly Agent Barton of SHIELD, and always and ever codenamed Hawkeye, is on a mission when SHIELD falls. He might be an Avenger these days, but he’s first and foremost a marksman, a sniper, and despite his newfound fame in certain arenas making him essentially useless for most undercover work, he’s still useful in his primary capacity. Up high with his bow, watching suspects or ops through his scope, ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Out of sight and out of mind but no less deadly for it. He’s watching over a team in some anonymous Albanian town, as they infiltrate and hopefully destroy a people trafficking cartel. This was supposed to be Sitwell’s op, Clint owed the guy, but he’d ended up unavoidably detained on a hi-jacked ship so Clint’s stuck with a team he doesn’t know or trust, and that doesn’t trust him either. Perfect scenario. 

Either the SHIELD fight-back gets a jump on HYDRA or HYDRA just don’t care enough to give their own people a heads up, because the first anyone on the mission knows that the game is up, is when the agent in charge of the mission, Miller, calls it dead and gives them a sit-rep of doom. He never gets to finish it because one of the team that Clint is supposed to be protecting walks into their base of operations and shoots Miller. The rest of the conversation that comes over the comms consists of just this: 

“All of you then?”

“Affirmative.”

“Barton. Take the shot.”

Miller makes the kind of horrible cut off noise that says headshot to Clint, but he’s too busy taking out the rest of the team. (Not his team. Double agents, they were never truly his people.) He’s very good at his job and he takes them out before they know what hit them, they don’t suffer, he maybe regrets that a little. The one who killed Miller gets the personal treatment though, nothing gruesome, just a bit of hand-to-hand ass kicking and some deserved verbal abuse, before Clint puts an arrow in his eye. 

He calls his emergency number and gets no response; he didn’t really expect to get one. He calls his real emergency number and there’s one message waiting. It’s Natasha confirming what he already knows. (Fury is dead. Anyone in SHIELD could be a HYDRA double agent. Trust no one.) Along with instructions to get to a rendezvous point in the Czech Republic for extraction – with co-ordinates that don’t match. He trusts the co-ordinates over the instructions and lays low in what turns out to be a safe-house in Sebastopol – Natasha’s not SHIELDs – until the political situation there gets a bit too intense and he bales out to a bolt hole of his own rather further west. Though not before collecting some mysterious paperwork from a contact of Natasha’s in Kiev, and passing it onto a rather terrifying Greek assassin for transportation to the States. He wishes he was taking it back himself, but Natasha is insistent that he stays that side of the Atlantic and he trusts her. 

He’s in an anonymous café in suburban München when he sees Natasha on the news. She’s the public face of the anti-HYDRA campaign, testifying to congress and all her secrets are there on the internet alongside every other one that SHIELD held. He wants to be furious at her, knows many of their colleagues will hate her not because they were secretly HYDRA but because of all the undercover work and agents who’ve been burned – who are even now, dead in ditches or being tortured without the comfort of knowing that someone is coming for them. He should be furious, but all he can see is he can see is his best friend, his partner, and everything that she’s sacrificed and how it weighs on her. Twenty million people not massacred from above seems a fair trade, but he’s certain she won’t see it like that, just more red in her ledger she can’t wipe out. He’d give everything to be there with her now, to share the blame and watch her back, but he’s stuck here and there’s job to do. 

A dead man slides into the booth across from him and stares at him for a long moment through his out of season shades before he speaks. 

“I’m trying this radical new lifestyle where I actually trust people, however, I admit I probably picked the worst week to do so, so let’s get this straight, if you’re not who Romanova thinks you are then I will not hesitate…”

“To throw me off a building the way she did to Sitwell?” Clint asks. “Yeah, consider the sentiment mutual.”

“You in then?” The dead man asks. 

“Sure, putting arrows in neo-Nazis always improves my day Marcus, I’m in.” Clint replies with a wry smile. 

The stakes are high, it’s not a game out here in the cold, but then it never was.

**Author's Note:**

> Gratuitious comics canon references ahoy! This fic was a product of being stuck on a rail replacement bus for the best part of 3 hours, listening to Skunk Anansie's latest album on repeat, on the way home from seeing Captain America. Also there was a throw-away line from Pierce, when Steve makes his intial break for it, that I can't remember exactly but was along the lines of pulling everyone who wasn't looking after active field operations onto this, and I wondered, what happend to them when SHIELD went down.


End file.
